As most people painfully remember, the Trump administration in 2018 announced its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, through which it sought to criminally prosecute the unauthorized entrance of every adult into the country. What had been framed as the “unintended” consequence that drew the most public outrage and backlash, the separation of children from their parents, turns out to not have been so unintended after all. A draft investigation report by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, has revealed the separation of children as a deterrence strategy consciously deployed by Trump administration officials, most notably former attorney general Jeff Sessions.
In May of 2018, U.S. attorneys of border states received the directive to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. Because children cannot be kept in federal jail with their parents, thousands of families were separated due to this policy, resulting in the dreadful images that we have seen of children, including month-old toddlers, kept in detention facility’s cages while their parents were prosecuted, sometimes for months. The draft report revealed top Justice Department officials as the “driving force” behind this cruel policy.
According to the report, then-attorney general Sessions, on a conference call with the border-state U.S. attorneys, made clear the goal of President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. “We need to take away children,” Sessions said. In a second call a week later, then-deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein instructed the prosecutors further, telling them it did not matter how young the children were.
After massive backlash, Sessions attempted to distance the Justice Department from the policy, telling CBN News that they “never really intended” to separate children. As the draft report shows, this was not true. Family separation was meant to be employed as a strategy to deter future illegal immigration. The policy was originally tested in a pilot program along the border of Texas, in which Justice Department officials understood and encouraged the separation of children from their parents. According to the report, Sessions and Rosenstein pushed to expand the practice along the entire border. “It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents bringing their children into the harsh circumstances that are present when trying to enter the United States illegally,” a Border Patrol official wrote to the U.S. attorney in New Mexico.
The blame of the outrageous policy has been pointed in all directions, from former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to the President himself. Gene Hamilton, lawyer and ally of Stephen Miller, the President’s point person for immigration policy, argued in response that the officials merely took orders from the President, citing an April 2018 meeting in which President Trump “ranted” and went on “a tirade” demanding as many prosecutions as possible.
Additionally, though officials have often claimed that the children were meant to be swiftly reunited with their parents, the investigation turned up a memo stating that the sentences of detained adults would range from three to 14 days, a length that made it certain that the children would be held in custody and therefore separated from their parents for extended periods of time. “We found no evidence, before or after receipt of the memorandum, that D.O.J. leaders sought to expedite the process for completing sentencing in order to facilitate reunification of separated families,” the inspector general wrote.
The draft report also revealed some previously unknown information about the “zero tolerance” policy. It found that, during a 2017 secret pilot program of family separation, government prosecutors were alarmed. “We have now heard of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants,” one prosecutor wrote. “I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log.” The policy also resulted in Border Patrol officers being stretched too thin to comply with the directive to prosecute all undocumented migrants, even low-priority ones like parents with infant children. As a result, officials missed more high-priority felony cases, which have typically demanded the highest attention from the Department of Homeland Security. A Texas prosecutor in 2018 warned top Justice Department officials that “sex offenders were released” due to the policy’s requirements.